No problems with the screen. Travels with me literally everywhere I can take my backpack. No case.
Are you using your laptop as a frisbee?
As far as Apple tax, you pay for quality tools. In life you get what you pay for.
My Festool Domino was $1200. It makes one particular hole in a piece of wood. It's very, very good at it--but it doesn't replace my tablesaw ($600) or my bandsaw ($700) or my tracksaw ($400) or my drill/driver ($300) or my jointer ($600) or my planer ($900) or my drill press ($500) or or or--and I did not buy particular spendy variants of any of those, except the Domino. (I could've easily spent $2000 on a tablesaw alone.)
Contrast this to a $2500 Macbook Pro, which is a future computer from beyond the moon that can do a ton of revenue-relative work without even kicking on its fans, and can watch Netflix besides. It is also small; it provides all those benefits in a thing that can fit on your coffee table, without the ongoing costs of storing actually expensive tools (edit: as mentioned downthread, for me that's about $550 a month based on my mortgage's square footage calculation).
Computer people complaining about computer costs when they're paid six figures for what they do with them is...it really needs to stop. It's silly.
So...what, then?
But if you do they will wear out.
It's pretty hard to wear out silicon. That's why the batteries are glued in and they're made out of glass. To encourage them to artificially wear them out.
I (try to) buy quality tools but I can't really justify Festool for my bodgy DIY attempts. I can barely justify the Bosch Professional tools I tend to buy instead.
My friend, an actual professional who fitted our kitchen, exclusively uses Festool. He can definitely justify it and swears by it. He says it's quicker and the tools suck up more dust which means less time cleaning up and less exposure to lung disease.
He'd never consider buying a MacBook Pro though as he thinks Apple is for poseurs ...like me.
I'm a professional software engineer and not a hairy arsed builder[1].
I spend roughly 8-10 hours a day on a laptop and I want a nice one. I'm probably going to switch from my Dell running Linux back to a MacBook Pro.
(That's for the shiny logo to make me look cool in coffee shops and not the battery life, performance or general attention to detail obvs.)
With regard to useful lifespan, I have an MBP from 2013 that's still going strong even if the OS updates from Apple are getting sparser.
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1. This, apparently, is the vernacular used by friends in the trades to describe a "proper" tradesman. You live and learn I guess. ;)
I do agree with your friend about dust collection though, which is why I use the tools I do use. Dust is the absolute worst, and it is worth spending money to solve that problem IMO. The thing about Festool (and also Fein)is that it's good at solving those problems portably, and in that light they're not that expensive. If you aren't a contractor and don't need to bring your entire work life around in a Systainer stack though, something like my 1.5HP Harbor Freight dust collector and a simple dust cyclone can get you very far by themselves. (They are, however, loud.)
I've also gotten into 3D printing I've been building better dust accessories for my other stuff. (For example I've got a set of 4" dust couplers in development that are a WIP but are noticeably better than any of the options I have found online for a reasonable price and that work in a home shop without ducting.)